How Does Shakespeare Attend to the Problem of Knowledge in Othello? My Thesis Is That There Is an Epistemic Crisis in Othello. Tragedy Is an Epistemological Problem. It Is the Outcome of the Problem of Knowledge.

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How does Shakespeare attend to the problem of knowledge in Othello?
My thesis is that there is an epistemic crisis in Othello. Tragedy is an epistemological problem. It is the outcome of the problem of knowledge.

Thesis underlines the notion that the play has an attitude towards the audience. The process of the play changes minds. Plays happen inside these plays. Othello as a play is an intrusion upon the mind, gesturing towards knowledge, something acquired by those who firstly know themselves, a proposition posited since the pre-Socratic Age. Socrates knew that he knew nothing. Othello also infiltrates the minds of the audience on an epistemological level by diverting their attention. In attending to the problem of knowledge, Shakespeare invokes the following questions: is theatre damaging to public welfare? Is it possible to allow for the transition of theatrical knowledge to pass into the public domain? And can the public acquire synthetic knowledge from a play? I will be answering these questions in my exploration of the epistemic crisis in Othello.
The play is put on trial; the crime is of insufficient and questionable knowledge. By extension, it is the failure in the act of belief to cultivate into knowledge. Knowledge is therefore caricatured by the act of belief in the dialogue between the characters in this play. The audience is the judge and jury; Shakespeare is the arbiter who mediates between the audience and the characters. The mediation takes the form of dramatic irony and proleptic irony. These theatrical and literary devices are used to expose the pervasive display of fallacy itself, which becomes a central motif. Shakespeare’s act of deploying fallacy takes the form of two things. Firstly it becomes a belief in the face of doubt, and secondly it places the audience in the role as psycho-analysts to suggest that their function
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